Missing
by PalsInABox
Summary: Ladybug hadn't shown up for patrol. He had tried to call her three times and it had gone straight to voicemail. It hadn't even rung. Usually it rang out long enough for the kwami to tell them that the other was trying to contact them. Had she taken her earrings off?
1. Realization

Ladybug hadn't shown up for patrol.

Adrien had waited at their usual spot for her. When she hadn't been there exactly on time, he hadn't thought twice about it. Running late wasn't unusual for either of them. Real life obligations and sneaking out of the house held both of them up at least once a week. He just leaned against the wall, crossed his arms, and closed his eyes.

Fifteen minutes passed and he had sighed, shifting positions. He had expected her to be there by then, but it wasn't like he could blame her for her tardiness. No one knew that they were Chat Noir and Ladybug, so literally anyone from her regular life could be holding her up without knowing that they were stopping a superhero from protecting the city.

Half an hour passed and he had sat down on the edge of the rooftop. This was a little later than either of them had been in quite some time. The past four years had seen the two of them settle into a routine and it was more than a little concerning that she wasn't there, especially on a Saturday night patrol. It wasn't like homework could be holding her up. He started to wonder if something had happened, but brushed it off. He didn't want to turn into one of those people who worried over nothing. It was essential to their partnership that he trusted her ability to take care of herself, after all.

A full hour later and he decided that he was not being ridiculous in his concern. Neither of them had ever been that late without letting the other know. He had tried to call her three times and it had gone straight to voicemail. It hadn't even rung. Usually it rang out long enough for the kwami to tell them that the other was trying to contact them. Had she taken her earrings off?

Adrien had gotten up to patrol on his own at that point, but it was more with the intent to search for his partner than to actually check for any wrong doings in Paris that night. Finding no sign of her, he had been forced to return home at about midnight.

Currently, he had detransformed and fallen back on to his bed, Plagg going over to where he had left out a piece of camembert for him and starting to eat the cheese.

"What do you think, Plagg?" he asked the black kwami. "Why wouldn't Ladybug show up?"

Plagg took a few bites and looked to be thinking about what Adrien was asking him before speaking. He had been uncharacteristically quiet in the fifteen minutes since they had gotten home and the blonde had noticed the difference. Was he worried, too? He had never asked, but Adrien had always assumed that he and Ladybug's kwami had to have known one another quite well. Afterall, their chosen had been partners for thousands of years.

"I don't know, kid," Plagg eventually admitted. "I can't sense Tikki, but that doesn't have to mean anything bad... They could have went out of town for some reason, ya know? A family emergency or something."

Adrien shook his head in disagreement.

"No way. Ladybug would have contacted me," he stated. "She would have excused herself to the bathroom and called or… or something. There's no way she would just take off."

"People have emergencies sometimes, Adrien," Plagg responded. "Something could have happened that made her not think straight. Someone in the hospital or worse that she really cares about. It doesn't have to be that something happened to her or to Tikki."

Even though the little cat said that, Adrien still thought that he looked just as worried as he did. Plagg could pretend to be indifferent all he wanted, but the young man could see that it wasn't true. He knew him too well after so long of being partners.

"When did you stop sensing her kwami?" he asked.

"It's not like I'm constantly looking for her or something," Plagg grumbled as he finished up his cheese. "I was napping before we went on patrol, remember? I guess… Maybe the last time I sensed her was when we were at school yesterday? I don't know..."

And it was there in that uncertainty that Adrien was finally _sure_ that he was seeing Plagg upset, too.

"Look, even if something did happen, and I'm not saying that it did, it doesn't do anyone any good for you to be up all night worrying about it," his kwami added before he could speak again, this time sounding unusually passionate for a topic that wasn't cheese related. "It's late. Go to sleep. We'll find your Ladybug in the morning when we can both think straight. If she really is missing or hurt, you'll be the only thing standing between Hawkmoth and Paris and you'll have to be your best."

Adrien sat up and ran his fingers through his hair.

He couldn't stand the idea that something had happened to Ladybug. He was supposed to protect her. He was supposed to be by her side when she was in trouble. Had an akuma hit that he hadn't known about? Had she been injured in her normal life? Had the earrings been stolen from her?

How was he supposed to sleep when the love of his life might be dead in a ditch somewhere?

He sighed and got out of bed.

"I'll take a shower and get to sleep," he finally agreed. "You should sleep, too, Plagg. We're going out first thing in the morning to look again."

Plagg nodded.

"Okay, okay. Don't torture yourself with what-ifs all night, though. Good night, kid."

Marinette blinked awake slowly, groaning from pain. Her whole body ached and she felt too groggy to think straight. She tried to bring her hand up to her had and found that her hand had been tied down. In fact, she couldn't move either of her hands or her legs.

She shook her head and tried to take in her surroundings, but it was pitch black and her wits were not with her anyway. She seemed to be sitting in a high backed chair that had arms, which was what her own limbs had been tied to.

"Tikki?" she asked quietly and cautiously.

No response.

In a panic, she tipped her head to the side, leaning her ear against her shoulder to feel for her earrings.

Nothing.

Well, that couldn't be good.


	2. Discovery

A/N: Wow! Sorry for the messed up chapter! Hopefully this works better.

Also, I didn't realize that I had only said that they were aged up on AO3. They are eighteen in this and at the end of their last year of school.

o-o-o

The restless feeling from the night before and a well timed (and rare) day off for Nathalie meant that Adrien didn't wake up until much later than usual. The sun was already high in the sky by the time his phone ringing woke him up.

The teenager groaned and rolled over to grab it from his night stand.

"Hello…?"

"Adrien, hey," Nino's voice came from the other side. "I know it's probably a no, but you haven't seen Marinette, have you, man?"

Adrien rubbed his eyes with his free hand and sat up. He frowned as he tried to clear his thoughts and his vision from sleep, attempting to make sense of what was being asked of him. Ever since becoming Chat Noir, he swore that he had a harder time waking up in the morning.

"Marinette?" he repeated. "Not since school on Friday. Why?"

Nino sighed on the other end and the blonde could hear him telling someone else the answer.

"She's missing," he responded. "Her parents went to check on her this morning and she wasn't there. They haven't seen her since yesterday at dinner. No one has. Alya yanked me out of bed this morning to go look around, not that I mind. Marinette would definitely do the same for us."

Adrien was silent for a moment as he took in what was being said. He pictured the sweet girl that he had been in class with for the last four years and couldn't imagine something happening to her. She was so tiny and fragile looking. He didn't even want to start listing possibilities in his mind.

"My dad's already at work, I'm sure, and it's Nathalie's day off. I'll come help you guys," he told his best friend. "Where are you at?"

After getting the address and hanging up, he tossed off his blankets and put his feet on the floor.

"Plagg, get up," he insisted, nudging the kwami. "Marinette's missing and I want to have a look around from a higher perspective before I meet up with the others."

For once, Plagg seemed to come out of sleep fairly quickly. In fact, Adrien thought that he looked troubled, but it was hard to say since the human had never seen that expression on his partner's face.

"I'm up," Plagg replied, floating near the blonde's face as he threw on a shirt and pants. "Just say the words, kid."

Adrien stared at him for a moment.

"No asking for camembert?" he asked skeptically.

The kwami held out a paw.

"I'm not going to turn it down if you insist," he said expectantly. "I was just trying to be helpful. I just assumed you'd want to rush out."

Adrien handed the cat-like creature a piece of his favorite cheese, which he swallowed quickly.

He felt like something was going on with Plagg, but he couldn't quite put his finger on it for some reason. It was always like that when he tried to get to the bottom of the kwami's moods. He thought that it probably had something to do with whatever magic kept their bond together, but he really hadn't ever asked Plagg. If there was one thing the black cat kwami was good at, it was being annoyingly stubborn. Plagg always tried to play it off as him being lazy or tired, but Adrien knew when the little creature was refusing to answer him.

"Plagg, claws out!"

o-o-o

Chat Noir had searched from above on the rooftops for about a half hour, but that was all of the time that he could afford to give the effort before it would seem strange to Nino and Alya that he hadn't shown up yet. He landed on the ground in an alley and headed towards the park near Marinette's home where they had agreed to meet up. As he walked up, he noticed two police cruisers in front of the Dupain-Cheng bakery, but that wasn't surprising, given the situation.

When he came in sight of his friends, he saw that they weren't alone. Quite a few people from their class had come, it seemed.

"Sorry I took so long. I had to get out of the house unseen," he lied.

"Don't worry about it, man. I'm sure you got here as quickly as you could," Nino said, patting his shoulder comfortingly.

"How are you doing, Alya?" Adrien asked gently.

"I just… I already put a post on the Ladyblog asking for Ladybug and Chat Noir's help, but no response, obviously. I wish they'd let us go up to her room and look for clues," Alya answered, sounding frustrated but anyone could see that she was hurting.

Adrien briefly wondered if maybe that was where Ladybug had been last night. After all, he knew that she knew Marinette somehow. There had been more than one occassion of his classmate being in trouble and her getting to the scene first. Additionally, she had been the one to originally give him Marinette's address a few years back when Nathanael had been akumatized. Plagg did say that it was possible that Ladybug was just out dealing with a personal emergency. A friend going missing certainly was an emergency.

"Babe, Tom and Sabine already said that we could go up to her room as soon as the police left," Nino reminded the girl, putting his arm around her shoulders. "Let's just organize our classmates into search parties and then we can see how long the police are going to be."

Alya nodded and turned to the other teens.

After about ten minutes, it was decided who would look where, a total of six teams going out to look for signs of Marinette and ask people if anyone had seen her. Alya had texted a recent picture of Marinette to everyone so that they could show it to people.

About the time that people had started out, a car could be heard starting and Nino was the first to notice that the police officers seemed to be leaving. Alya grabbed Nino and Adrien by the upper arms and pulled them back over to the obviously closed bakery. After a few short words were exchanged with Tom, the three went up to Marinette's room.

The first thing that struck Adrien was that the room looked different than any other time that he had been up here. Although he had become much better friends with the girl since their best friends had started dating and had been to her house on quite a few occasions, he had somehow never seen the posters on the wall of him. Had he been blind to them all of this time or were they new?

His baffled face seemed to catch Nino's attention as Alya rushed over to Marinette's computer and started to log into the girl's social media accounts (luckily Marinette had never been overly secretive with her passwords).

"Seriously, dude, this is not the time for you to suddenly realize Mari's crush on you," his best friend said quietly, careful not to upset the only female in the room any worse than she already was. "We can talk about it when she's safe at home."

Adrien shook his head.

"Sorry," he quickly apologized, blushing. "I wasn't trying to… I'll just… Help look around…"

Marinette had a crush on him? How long had that been going on for? How had he never noticed? Had he been insensitive at any point because of it? Now he really felt bad. Apparently this girl had been crazy enough about him to put multiple pictures on her wall of him and he had never even once thought about her behavior in that light because he had been blinded by his own crush on Ladybug, not that that relationship seemed to be going anywhere.

If- When Marinette came home, he would make sure to be a lot more conscientious of her feelings. He knew what it was like to be ignored by someone that you thought the world of, even if it was a complete accident.

Besides, she was kind, smart, beautiful, and she always made him laugh. His father seemed to like her, or at least her designs, when he had met her through design competitions at their school. She was definitely the kind of girl that he would have gone for if he hadn't been so wrapped up in his crime fighting partner all of this time. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad to give her a chance once he was sure that Ladybug didn't think of him that way…

He shut down that train of thought almost immediately. What a ridiculous time to be thinking about romance. Marinette could be seriously hurt or worse and he was daydreaming about dates…

The blonde hit himself in the forehead, glad that he had retreated over to the other side of the room so that Nino and Alya wouldn't see his strange behavior. On the return trip to his side, the back of his hand hit something and knocked it off of the top of the vanity. He bent down to pick it up and froze.

A small, black box in the shape of a hexagon.

A box for a Miraculous.

o-o-o

The second time Marinette woke up, the room was still dark, though she could easily tell from how alert she felt that it most certainly had to be day time, possibly quite late given her usual preference to sleep in. Apparently this room had no windows for light to seep into, not even a crack, which would make escape all the more difficult.

If she even could escape without Tikki…

She had struggled quite a bit the night before, ultimately giving up since it seemed useless. She had wanted to break down in tears, but had held it together in case her captor decided to show himself. She was Ladybug and she would act like it. Besides, crying would only make her sluggish if an opportunity to escape appeared. And so she had settled down to sleep and conserve energy in hopes that that time would come.

The clicking of shoes on what were most likely tile covered stairs alerted her to another person approaching before the door opened, giving her a moment to flinch away and saving her eyes from the light that flooded in. It still took a moment to adjust, but it could have been worse.

"Miss Dupain-Cheng. So glad to see you awake," a male voice said in an almost taunting tone. "Or do you prefer to be called Ladybug?"

o-o-o

If you want the updates right away, follow me on tumblr. I have the same name, Palsinabox, and I post the story there first.


	3. Understanding

Sorry to anyone who read the last chapter when the format was messed up! I copied it from my Tumblr blog and the coding came with it, I guess! Thanks to LovePuppy25 and Hopeshard for the heads up!

-o-o-

After finding the box for a Miraculous, Adrien had told Nino and Alya that he was going to go up to the roof to look for clues. He had never gone through the inside of the building to get to the roof terrace, but Alya had given him instructions on how to get up there. Unfortunately, he had to go over Marinette's bed to climb out of the roof hatch, which had not helped his completely flustered mind to be _in_ _Ladybug's bed_ for even the few seconds that it took to crawl across.

Once he was out, he shut the hatch and immediately yanked Plagg out of his shirt pocket.

"You knew, didn't you?" he demanded. "You've been acting weird all morning. You knew that Marinette is Ladybug."

Plagg sighed and nodded.

"Sorry, but yeah. I did," he replied. "Kwami aren't allowed to share the identities of other Miraculous wielders. There's old magic protecting your identities, even from each other. Sometimes especially from each other. Would you want Nooroo to tell Hawkmoth who you are?"

Adrien hesitated for a moment, seeing the little cat's point. Even if he was really upset that Plagg had been keeping Ladybug's identity a secret for the last four years, he could understand why the magical gag order was necessary. He wasn't sure how many Miraculous holders had gone bad over the centuries (and even millennia), but he was sure that Hawkmoth was not the first, nor would be be the last. There had probably even been evil Chat Noirs and Ladybugs.

"Okay," he said in acceptance. "So what do we do now?"

"You're gonna have to find her on your own," Plagg answered, though he had the decency to look adequately annoyed about it, at least. "I can't lead you to Hawkmoth any easier than I can lead you to Ladybug."

"So then you think Hawkmoth took her?" the blonde asked quickly, looking back up at his kwami.

"I don't know," Plagg said with a shrug. "Seems likely."

"What if we go all around the city? Could you tell me if we were close to one of their kwamis?" Adrien tried.

Plagg shook his head.

"Can't do it," he replied.

Adrien sighed in an explosive manner, obviously frustrated with this conversation getting nowhere. He was afraid for Ladybug, for Marinette, and he had nothing to go off of as to where to find her. Now that he knew who she was, it was even more likely that his friend was in grave danger.

"Ladybug is _missing_ , Plagg! She might be hurt or worse! Her _kwami_ could be hurt or worse," he exclaimed in an upset tone. "Don't you care? They could be dead and we'd be standing around here doing nothing! We have to try!"

The teenager had no idea how to read the look that came over his kwami's face after being yelled at. They had had some fights over the last four years, but nothing really serious, and they usually just consisted of Adrien getting annoyed and Plagg being indifferent until they made up. This was completely different, though. If he had to guess, he could only describe Plagg's current emotion as fury.

"Have you ever spent over five _thousand_ years with the same partner?" the kwami asked sharply. "You can't even _begin_ to know what Tikki means in my life. Don't tell me that I don't care. What you're doing is useless, though. Walking around on this roof yelling at me might make _you_ feel better, but it's not gonna bring Ladybug back."

He sighed, clearly calming down again, the anger quickly leaving his tiny body.

"If I could help you more, I would," he added. "You have to do this on your own."

Adrien nodded in understand, not knowing what else to do.

He had never seen Plagg mad at him before. He must have really overstepped in his own desperation. His kwami clearly had strong feelings for Ladybug's kwami, which wasn't something that he had ever really thought of before today. Plagg had always seemed like his own personal friend, so much so that he sometimes forgot that the little creature had been around for thousands of years, so long that he had once said that he wasn't quite sure how old he was. It was hard to picture his relationship with another of his own kind, but he supposed it made a lot of sense. Ladybug was more than just his partner to him, even from the first time they'd worked together. He couldn't even imagine what Plagg and this Tikki must share after so long.

"I'm really sorry, Plagg," he apologized after a moment.

"Don't worry about it, kid," Plagg responded, waving a hand as if it was nothing. "Humans are emotional and I know how you get about Ladybug."

The night before when he had been worried about Ladybug, he had tried to make himself believe that nothing bad had happened to her. He had wanted to think that she had just had some very good reason to miss patrol and to take her earrings off. Trying to call her had been his only real attempt at searching for her.

He _had_ looked for Marinette, but that search had been entirely different. He had looked for her mainly with his eyes, using the height rooftops as his advantage. He hadn't known what she had been wearing or how far she could have possibly gone. He had just been hoping to get lucky, which really wasn't what he was known for.

Knowing that the two missing girls were the same person, though, was a game changer, now that he thought about it. He knew so much about her. He knew both ways that she could look now. He knew how she smelled, thanks to his time with her as Ladybug. He knew what kinds of things she liked to do for hobbies as Marinette and what kinds of places she might visit. Besides, it wouldn't be the first time he had had to track her down.

"Alya and Nino are just going to have to forgive me for disappearing," he stated. "We've got a bug to find. Plagg, claws out!"

-o-o-

Marinette wasn't sure what she had been expecting being captured to be like, but she had certainly been left alone more than she had thought she would be. She couldn't really be certain about what time it was or how many hours had passed, but the pain in her wrists from her bindings told her that it had been a significant around of time.

Her captor had been in earlier to gloat about getting her earrings and her current predicament, but he had given her some water. Apparently he wasn't entirely as cruel as he had previously seemed. That or he didn't want his Chat Noir bait to die of dehydration while they waited for him to figure out where she was.

She had to admit that she couldn't tell if she wanted her partner to find her. On the one hand, he would be walking right into a trap. She had been taken prisoner with the express intent of luring the other superhero to her location. If he showed up to save her, there was the very real possibility that he would have his Miraculous taken, as well, and their enemy would win. Surely her life wasn't worth the lives of however many people would be in danger if the two Miraculous jewels were used together. Tikki had never really explained it to her, but if it was what a villain wanted to do, it couldn't be a good thing.

On the other hand, she knew that her life _was_ worth it to Chat Noir. He cared about her deeply, in a way that she couldn't explain, and she had to admit that her eyes had been darting to where she knew the door was now every so often, in hopes that he would show up. She wasn't used to needing to be rescued, but she didn't mind it as long as it was him. They were a team.

Some teammate she was right then, though. For all she knew, any minute now, light would burst into the dark room once again as her captor threw her partner inside, his fate the same as hers. What would happen then, if they were both taken prisoner?

She really didn't want to think about it.

-o-o-

Again, if you want the updates right away, follow me on tumblr. I have the same name, Palsinabox, and I post the story there first.


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